Monthly Archives: September 2009

Mark Bradford, Artist and (ahem) Genius

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Winners of the MacArthur “genius” grants were announced yesterday. Having recently been very impressed by one winner’s work, I’ll refrain from my usual curmudgeony response to these newly minted geniuses. Mark Bradford won one of the $500,000 prizes. He is a mixed-media artist who is sharing a show with Kara Walker (a former MacArthur grant winner) at Sikkema Jenkins in Chelsea now.

Red Painting, above, is kinda genius. It’s a real show stopper right by the door. This jpeg doesn’t at all do it justice. That and the one below, Orbit, are both large with a lot of small detail you can’t appreciate like this. Easy solution? Go to Sikkema Jenkins and see some genius.

Milking the Maid, One More Time

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The first room of the new exhibition Vermeer’s Masterpiece, The Milkmaid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reminds you how precious this masterpiece is with a simple device: the wall is covered with a grid of 36 images of paintings. They represent all that has survived of 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s oeuvre of 40 or so paintings. Of those 36, The Milkmaid stands out like a jewel. The Metropolitan has The Milkmaid on loan from the Rijksmusem through November 29, and has created a small exhibition around it.

Continued here on Blogcritics.
It is a great painting, and the rest aren’t bad either. Just look at NYC’s wealth of Vermeers. And if all this is just too much sweetness and color and light for you, get a load of this guy’s codpiece:

The Archer and the Milkmaid, Andries Stock, ca. 1610

This is one of the drawing’s being shown at the Met that makes an argument for the milkmaid as sex object in 17th C. Dutch culture.

Self-Portraits from James Turrell’s show at PaceWilderstein

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Art Ravel’s 2009 Prize for Best Artwork to Take Self-Portraits With goes to…
James Turrell at PaceWildenstein


Remember holograms? They were big in the 80s. Anyhow, these seemingly 3D depictions of color by James Turrell make awesome backdrops for photographs. Awesome.

I actually saw quite a lot of abstract color when I went to Chelsea on Saturday, and this might be in a sense the purest form of it. Or it might be the transference of abstract Minamalist principles to a new medium (which seems not nearly as high-tech as it did in the 80s).

This jpeg on the left doesn’t really do the work justice either; the shifting work creates a experiential process of looking that is hard to capture. In case you are really into holograms, the show is up at Pace’s 25th St location through October 17th. It could potentially be a soul searching experience in which you touch the miraculous essence of color and exit a changed being, but most likely any reveries you have will be interrupted by inspired photographers like myself whipping out their camera phones. Maybe try to go when the gallery is less busy. : )